‘And you.’
‘And me. Same kill site. Same location. And nobody at West End Central has got a clue. We’ve rented an academic, a historian from King’s College, and even he is drawing a blank.’
John sipped his tea.
‘Talk me through it,’ he said.
And so I did. All of it. From the moment the white van drew away to the armed guard outside Abu Din’s council house to the appearance of the black van. From the unimaginable muscle spasms of being shot by a conducted electrical weapon to the mystery ride to the kill site. I told him how I had fought for my life.
And I even told him the one thing that I had held back from everyone else. I felt the need to tell someone.
I told John Caine how I had aborted my hanging.
‘Hold on. You had a gun?’
‘A Glock 17. Belonged to an ex-serviceman friend of mine. I’ll not tell you his name, if that’s OK.’
‘I don’t need to know his name, Max. But you were armed?’
‘I took it from my friend because I was afraid of what he might do with it. And I took it with me to Abu Din’s house because I thought the Hanging Club would not hesitate to kill me to get to Abu Din. I was going to get rid of it after that, chuck it in the Thames from the middle of a bridge.’ I thought of young Steve Goddard Junior and his knife. ‘Or drop it down a drain,’ I said.
I was covered in a cold sweat at the memory of having the gun in my hand and wanting to kill them with it. It felt like I had broken enough firearms regulations to get slung out on my ear, or slung in a room with bars on the window. I silently thanked the heavens that it was our people who had found the gun.
‘Have you still got the Glock?’ John asked.
‘No.’
‘Good boy.’
He wasn’t interested in the gun any more. There are a lot of firearms in the Black Museum. Guns held no special fear or fascination for Sergeant John Caine.
‘Then you went after them,’ he said.
‘This is where it gets blurry. We were underground. And they went deeper underground. It was totally black – stairs that led to a tunnel that led to a passageway – big arched columns that were meant to process large numbers of people. It looked like a football stadium at first – it had that kind of epic quality to it, as though thousands of people were going to pass this spot.’
‘And it turned out to be an abandoned tube station.’
‘British Museum. You ever heard of it?’
He shook his head. ‘But London is full of disused underground stations. They’ve been closing them down since 1900. They were very busy during the Blitz. Since then, not so much. And they found you outside British Museum, right? It’s pretty central, Max.’
‘I know,’ I said, and we sipped our tea in silence. I could feel the sugar kicking in.
‘One other thing,’ I said. ‘When they were taking me to the kill site, they took me down a corridor, and it was like something from a nightmare, something from a fairy story. Because it kept getting smaller. It was Alice in Wonderland stuff. The roof came down, the walls came in, and by the time we got to the end of it I had my arms pressed against my side and my head hunched down.’
His face was suddenly white with shock.
‘That’s Dead Man’s Walk,’ he said. ‘There’s a reason the ceiling gets lower and the walls come in, Max. It’s because when a man – or a woman – knew that they were about to hang, they went fighting mad. They went berserk. The corridor getting smaller was a way to physically control the condemned.’
I could feel the welt around my neck throbbing with blood.
‘Where’s Dead Man’s Walk?’ I said.
‘You mean – where was it?’ he said. ‘Dead Man’s Walk was in Newgate Prison. But, Max – Newgate was razed to the ground more than one hundred years ago.’
30
‘Dead Man’s Walk was in Newgate Prison,’ I told Whitestone as I walked back to my car. ‘Don’t let Professor Hitchens leave. I’ll be there in five minutes.’
I put on the blues-and-twos for the short drive to 27 Savile Row, fully expecting to find MIR-1 feverish with excitement when I arrived. But they all looked up at me as if it was just the end of another long day. Whitestone. Edie. Billy Greene. Tara. And Professor Hitchens, who had an ancient map of London, coloured gold and black, spread out across four workstations.
Whitestone gave me a sad smile.
‘Looks like chump bait, Max,’ she said. ‘Sorry.’
‘What’s chump bait?’ Tara said.
‘Chump bait is a false lead,’ I said. ‘Chump bait is deliberately sending an investigation in completely the wrong direction. But—’
‘Newgate Prison no longer exists,’ Hitchens said. ‘You have to get that into your head, Max. I have no idea where you were taken, but it couldn’t have been Newgate. This is Charles Booth’s map of London in 1899. It’s what they call a “poverty map” – it was originally drawn to show areas of chronic want in the city. Black indicates poverty, gold indicates wealth.’ His index finger tapped the centre of the map. ‘What does that say?’
I stared at the map. And there it was, between Smithfield meat market and St Paul’s Cathedral, right at the very heart of the city.
‘Newgate Gaol,’ I read.
‘That’s right. As you can see, Newgate Prison is clearly visible at the end of the nineteenth century. And now look at Booth’s poverty map of 1903, just four years later.’
He unfolded what looked like an identical black and gold map of London and spread it on top of the first.
‘No Newgate,’ I said.
Hitchens nodded.
‘Because Newgate was razed to the ground in 1902,’ he said. ‘The prison stood for nearly a thousand years, but it was completely demolished at the start of the twentieth century. The Central Criminal Court – the Old Bailey – was built on the site. It was a deeply symbolic gesture. One kind of British justice – medieval, brutal, retributive – was replaced at the start of the new century with another kind of British justice – modern, fair and just.’
‘So nothing of Newgate remains?’ Whitestone asked. ‘Nothing at all?’
Hitchens began folding up his maps.
‘There’s a very nice pub opposite the Old Bailey – the Viaduct Tavern – with what’s left of Newgate’s cells down in the beer cellar,’ he said. ‘Debtors’ cells that held up to twenty people. They say the smell was so bad that it could have choked a horse. But I’ve seen them and they don’t match Detective Wolfe’s description. In fact, they’re nothing like them. Your colleague at New Scotland Yard is quite correct, Max – your description perfectly matches the corridor in Newgate Gaol called Dead Man’s Walk. It progressively narrowed so that the condemned man – or woman – could not turn around to fight or flee. But it hasn’t existed for over one hundred years.’
They were all looking at me with something approaching pity.
‘But it was real,’ I said. ‘I saw it. I walked down it.’
‘The internal architecture of Newgate is well documented,’ Hitchens said. ‘The prison appears on the very first map of London drawn in 1575 by Georg Braun and Franz Hogenberg. More than anywhere that ever existed, Newgate represented traditional British justice, red in tooth and claw. So whoever abducted you knew exactly what they were doing. They knew exactly what that corridor resembles.’ He slipped his maps into his man bag and wiped his hand across his sweating forehead. ‘But trust me – it couldn’t have been Newgate.’
‘I want to check out the pub,’ Whitestone said. ‘The Viaduct Tavern.’
‘There’s not much there,’ Hitchens said. ‘Certainly nothing that—’
Whitestone raised one hand, silencing him, and I saw the thread of steel inside this unassuming woman. Her world had been torn apart this summer but she was still running this murder investigation and she wanted to see the cellars of the Viaduct Tavern.